On Nov 18, 2008, at 12:18 PM, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) wrote:
>
>
>
> Dan Connolly wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 2008-11-16 at 12:51 -0600, Robert J Burns wrote:
>> [...]
>>> I think this question of "who will edit?" that keeps coming up is
>>> a complete red herring.
>> While I agree with some of the goals you seem to be aiming for,
>> you completely lose me there. "He who does the work makes the rules"
>> proves out over and over, in my experience.
>
> Well, this won't be the first time that you and
> I have disagreed, Dan, but IMHO "he who makes
> the rules" is actually the W3C, the WG's Charter,
> and the consensus of the WG. "He who does the
> work" is therefore required to follow these rules,
> and if his personal opinion comes into conflict
> with the rules, then the rules must win.
However, the WG is not free to decide arbitrarily. We are bound by our
charter: http://www.w3.org/2007/03/HTML-WG-charter.html
In particular, we are chartered to produce "a single specification
deliverable for the HTML Working Group, the HTML specification", "for
describing the semantics of documents and applications on the World
Wide Web" and including "Document Object Model (DOM) interfaces
providing APIs for such a language". Clearly our charter expects a
monolithic spec covering many things.
I think some forms of splits, such as putting programming interfaces
which could apply to any interactive Web markup language and not just
HTML into seprate specs under the WebApps WG, would not violate the
spirit of this charter. But splitting the DOM from the markup
language, thereby making the "main" markup language spec
We have also elected to state some broader group principles: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/principles/
By these principles, we should not ask extra work of the editor unless
there would be a substantial practical benefit to implementors,
authors, or end users, rather than solely a theoretical benefit.
In particular, as to this proposal:
>
> And because this WG is the HTML 5 WG, and not the Web Applications
> WG, many of us feel that the specification is already far
> too broad, and that what is needed -- urgently needed --
> is for the specification to become far more focussed : to address,
> purely and simply, what is (and what is not) HTML 5,
> leaving much of the accompanying material to ancilliary
> specifications, and -- quite possibly -- to other working groups.
if "what is (and what is not) HTML5" is limited solely to defining
what documents are conforming HTML5 documents, then this kind of split
will not fulfill the letter or the spirit of our Charter or our Design
Principles.
Anyone is of course free to question our group's founding documents
and previous decisions. But let's be clear - what is being proposed by
many is a radical change in approach from what we have been asked to
do by the W3C, and from what many of us have seen as our mission.
Regards,
Maciej